Google/Netscape

Antonio D’souza writes in OSNews

Netscape’s business model consisted of selling webservers to organizations. Its legendary web browser hardly brought in any money through direct sales. What it did do, however, was give the fledgling company instant high visibility in the online world. When organizations were shopping for a webserver, the Netscape brand was instantly recognizable. Additionally, their browser’s position as de facto standard web browser allowed Netscape to effectively control the development of HTML, giving it an edge over competitors in the nascent market for webservers.

When Microsoft needed to crush Netscape, it went for the jugular. Via a combination of sketchy but effective tactics it was able to unseat Netscape from its comfortable spot atop the web browser heap and place its own IE there instead. This meant that it was now Microsoft who wielded the power to influence the direction of web development. It also tarnished Netscape’s image as a leading Internet brand. Between that and Apache’s sudden rise to dominance, Netscape saw sales of their webserver decline. Since they had never found a sustainable line of business that was independent of the browser’s popularity, they could no longer survive.

There is no doubt that Google will continue to be a top-notch search engine so it is unlikely to be eclipsed by any new search technology that Microsoft can unleash upon the world, no matter how much money they throw at the project. However, Microsoft does not need to compete with Google using the traditional rules when they have an unstoppable weapon at their disposal in the form of the Windows monopoly. They will will change the nature of the game entirely by building search features based upon MSN into Longhorn and gently cajoling users into giving up on the use of a web browser to search the web. By redefining search to encompass local documents as well as the web, it will be able to leverage its desktop muscle in a manner against which Google, having no stranglehold on the desktop market, will find itself unable to compete. After all, nobody has ever taken Microsoft on in the desktop arena and escaped unscathed.